What is the average bee lifespan

Queens produce unfertilized eggs that hatch into drones, or male honey bees. The main purpose of a drone is to mate with the queen, and their life span relates directly to this task. If a mature drone successfully mates with a queen, he will die soon after the mating flight. If he is unsuccessful in the mating flight, the drone will be ejected from his hive at the end of the active summer season and will eventually die of cold or starvation.

Worker bees are the smallest members of the colony, but have the largest number of individuals: a hive can contain 20, to 80, workers. The life span of worker honey bees ranges from five to seven weeks.

The first few weeks of a worker's life are spent working within the hive, while the last weeks are spent foraging for food and gathering pollen or nectar. The life span of the honey bee is also determined by pollen consumption and protein abundance, as well as the honey bee's level of activity.

Queens, who spend their lives laying eggs inside the hive, could live for several years; workers who labor during busy seasons cannot survive as long. Mechanics of Honey Bee Mating. Honey Bee Eggs. Anatomy of a Honey Bee. Honeybee Life Cycle. Drone bees first leave the hive six days after emerging from the pupal cell, flying to areas known for drone congregation and going back to the hive only when they have failed to mate.

Successful maters die minutes or hours after mating with the queen, and the rest of the drone bees survive only as long as the worker bees allow them to. If there is a shortage of food, the worker bees kill or kick out the drones. Drone bees rarely survive the winter, as the worker bees want to protect their limited resources. When a drone bee is ejected from the hive, he soon dies from cold or starvation. The average life span of a drone bee is eight weeks. Worker bees also gather water to use to cool the inside of the nest on hot days, and use water to dilute the honey before feeding it to the larvae.

It is worker bees who are responsible for pollination: When they land on plants or flowers, they collect pollen dust all over their bodies, and then use their specially adapted legs to discard the pollen, leaving it on other plants. During summer, worker bees only live for five to six weeks, purely because their heavy workload often gets the better of them.

This is their most active time of the year, when they spend their days foraging for food, storing nectar, feeding larvae and producing honey. Worker bees live longer in winter — five months or more — because their fat supplies increase and their well-developed glands provide food for larvae.

The queen bee has a very important function within the colony, and has the longest life span by far. While the average life span of a queen bee is two to five years, queen bees have been known to live up to seven years, although this is rare.

About a week after a new queen emerges from her cell, she goes on several flights in order to mate with as many as 20 drones. After the queen bee returns to lay her eggs, she will rarely leave the colony. Thereafter, the queen bee lays between 1, and 2, eggs a day inside the hive she has enough sperm stored in her sperm pouch to enable her to fertilize her eggs for the rest of her life. If the queen bee fertilizes the egg, that egg will become female — a worker bee or a queen bee.

However, if the queen bee does not fertilize the egg, it will become a male drone bee. The queen's survival in the difficult winter months depends largely on how viable her colony is.

A strong group of worker bees protects the queen and regulates her temperature. The worker bees keep a close eye on the queen bee to make sure she is up to her job. If she doesn't lay enough eggs, the workers will start developing a new queen to replace the old one, a process known as supersedure. The new queen is pampered with food and affection, while the old queen is neglected and left to waste away. In some beekeeping practices, the beekeeper replaces the queen after one or two years.

The queen is responsible for laying every single egg for the colony. She is the only reproductive female, and therefore the other bees are instinctively driven to protect her. Drones are the males of the colony and their purpose is try to mate with a queen. Workers bees that are hatched in the spring and summer live for six or seven weeks. This is when the colony is most productive, and they generally lead short but busy lives collecting nectar and pollen to feed the colony.

Since the queen stops producing eggs before winter, workers hatched in late autumn will live much longer, up to six or seven months, keeping the hive warm and caring for the queen. Making up most of the hive, worker bees are responsible for most of the duties in maintaining the colony, and their duties change depending on their age.